Random stuff in my brain
I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon. I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.
I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks. It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently. I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts – ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses. But so much of relationship formation and bonding – the good stuff – happens in the in-between spaces. I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.
So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice. =)
I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves. Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program. In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies. He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft. And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.)
One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity. They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication. They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics.
Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:
- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?
- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?
- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions. I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.
Hi Susan – I’m in Austin. I am booked tomorrow (Thursday) but could meet up somewhere central from about Friday lunch time to about 4pm. You can email me directly if that fits your schedule. I think you have my email address.
My husband is a director at the Austin Technology Incubator…if you are interested he might be able to give you a tour.
Aruni
BTW, his name is Erin Defosse and his email address is edefosse@ati.utexas.edu if you would like to contact him directly.
Very cool posting!
I cannot give a good answer to your question, I am just not expert enough
I am business student from Erasmus University (The Netherlands, Rotterdam) currently studying the how virtual worlds can have an effect on the fuzzy front end activities belonging to the innovation value chain. Your post helped me to change my perspective in a different way! Thank you!
Enjoy your day!
Maurits
The Netherlands, Rotterdam
Hey Susan. Why did you switch over to not providing full RSS feeds anymore? Really want to read you but only do blogs through RSS readers.
-J
Hey Jon, I’m not sure why it’s not. Must be a wordpress issue. I’ll look into it.
hi Susan – random is good – great post.
There is a lot of studies on economic development and cultural change somce of which touch on language change and language adoption.
University of chicago press is a good source for a taster:
http://ideas.repec.org/s/ucp/ecdecc.html
Springer press’s Language Policy series is also worth a look. Titles such as Language Spread in a Country Under Transition – maps the adoption of english in Cambodia and the different economic and social drivers for this.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w425u4/front-matter.pdf
I think springer has published a study on china too.
re: company culture.. Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?
I’d say collective utility function – filtered and influenced through founding teams values. Which is why the early hires are critical – they don’t just influence the vision – but heavily influence how the vision is implemented and executed upon and carried forward..
Enjoy GDC and Austin.
- P.
Hi Susan – thanks for the randomness, love it and like the direction you’re taking…I’m trying it myself.
On the q’s – I reckon a quantifiable culture at a company/group/country is quite a powerful tool. Just depends on who uses it.
I’m in Australia and have felt the immense pressures of figuring out how to keep the most talented people at the place I am working (World Vision). I think the HR functions have begun thinking that ‘culture is the answer!’ They then follow…’So lets measure it!’
I think it can be measured (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?ex=1189310400&en=2e6f1ade61393911&ei=5070 ) and I don’t think thats such a bad thing so long as it doesn’t impact that culture in a negative way. But, I think the biggest advantage is it allows orgs to see where there might be less generative (or resonant) people, people that don’t quite jive wth the rest of the group. These people, with this info, should be let go. To not do so, only increases the likleyhood that they will cause the good people to leave first.
phew
Lastly, I havn’t done any research – but the Richard Florida book Flight of the Creative Class, gives some good insights into why leads to greater economic output – one factor being diversity (which is only increased with more diverse and linguistic societies, I would assume)
Cheers!
There are ways that one can establish a threshold by which you agree to an exchange of currency in favor of a social decision. However, I don’t believe that to be a true measure of utility. Can currency be a true measure of utility? It is a convenient way to measure utility, but it doesn’t ever really quantify a base amount of satisfaction or happiness, which is how I typically look at the term. And the correlation between money amd the examined variable would be flawed based upon the many other vaiables that could potentially affect the decision. I would have scrutinize any research which suggested that a culture witin a company could be reduced to a multi-dimensional analysis. A virtual world presents the opportunity to study the effects of a finite number of variables, but a real world experiment would lack the necessary control structure to validate the model.
It is an interesting idea though. I’m certain there are some fundamentals that could be hypothesized, much like the epidemiology studies that have resulted from the release of a virus within warcraft. Maybe Stanfor could reduce corporate communications down to a vector analysis so that we could begin to isolate the outbreak of a rumor
I’ll be at Raph’s last panel discussion at 1:30 on Friday. If you happen to be there as well, I’d like to say hi.
Cheers!
Robert
Just a stab at the last thought… I would imagine that economic growth today is correlated with language changes, but does not cause changes in language. Instead, societal changes like increased mobility, urbanization, migration and wider reach of education would lead to language changes.
don’t know of any empirical data on language rate of change, however i have heard anecdotal comments about Japanese & English being 2 languages with some of the highest % of borrowed words from other cultures.
guessing that may also be true of Mandarin / Cantonese, at least going forward. however that may be a trailing rather than leading indicator.
beyond the points you raise above about virtual currency, i think there is an actual currency / several asset classes missing from the current money supply based on individuals, small business, & natural resources. i wrote a few ideas on these subjects out a few years back here:
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2002/06/random_rant_on_.html
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2005/01/securitization_.html
collectively, these largely non-existent [currently] asset classes are likely measured in the tens if not hundreds of trillions of dollars. it will be interesting to see what impact they have on society when we finally incorporate them over the next 10-20-50 years… (at least, if/until the Singularity hits. then it’s a whole new ballgame
- dmc
I imagine that there isn’t much correlation between language change and economic growth, let alone a cause and effect relationship. The English language hasn’t changed much at all over the last 400 years; we can still read Shakespeare without much difficulty. Contrast that with the rapid change of the Japanese language, where the majority can’t understand pre-Meiji literature (1868). Even today Japanese continues to evolve at a blistering pace.
Although these are only two examples, I’m led to believe that the evolution of language has more to do with attitudes toward education and writing.
Susan,
In response to your twitter re: Vegas sushi joints. Nobu in the Hard Rock is excellent, I highly recommend it.
Hello Susan
I see you are speaking at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in San Jose this week. There is a ning site here related to the conference and some interesting topics have already started. Unfortunately I can’t make it to San Jose, enjoy yourself. And may all conferences be virtual in the near future.
Cheers
Joi Koi
- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?
No, I don’t think you can say that. A “utility function” is just an abstraction
in economics. People don’t really have “utility functions”: it doesn’t make
sense to speak of wanting something “5 utils” more than something else.
All that is really conveyed by a utility function is, for an individual, an
ordering of desires. “I like chocolate more than strawberry” would be
captured by any utility function assigning more utils to chocolate than to
strawberry. Similarly, all my desires, at a particular time, must be in some
total order (or else I could not act on any of them), and my utility function
is any monotonically increasing function along this order. Since any
monotonically increasing function works, it doesn’t make sense to talk
about the specific values of the utility function, and moreover, it doesn’t
make sense to combine different individuals’ utility functions.
In other words, there is simply no such thing as a “collective utility
function”.
Some people (of the Austrian economic persuasion) have argued
forcefully against the entire concept of utility function, as they tend
to be very misleading. For instance, a naive understanding of utility
functions suggests the possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utilities.
The Austrian criticism is right, in a sense, because utility functions
are dangerous unless you remember their limitations. In a different
sense, it’s wrong, because utility functions, when handled with care,
can greatly simplify certain kinds of analysis. But it’s still true that
they really capture nothing more than a single individual’s ranking
of desires.
I’m not saying the behavior of corporations can’t be explained, but I
am saying that utility functions are the wrong model for doing so,
as they apply only to individuals, individually, and not to groups of
people.
I enjoyed your blog, what there is of it. My buddy and colleague Manuel tells me you had a good chat at the virtual worlds conference so I decided to check out what you are writing about. I left a comment on your nintendo article. And I agree that Haruki Murakami is the bomb. It’s sad, my wife and I used to be voracious readers. Ever since B-school, I’ve been challenged to read anything other than magazines and newspapers. And all my wife does these days is raid with her level 70 guild on WoW. But the other day coming back from Tokyo Game Show, I read a H.Murakami novel front to back on the plane and was instantly put in that kind of funk that only he can put you into. Anyway, like Manuel, I’m a game conference regular, I’m sure we will meet eventually. Perhaps Lyon or D.I.C.E. or GDC SF?
“What does it do to a [company’s] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?”
This reminds me of the quote: “what is the roi (return on investment) of putting on your pants in the morning?” I’m sure one could get a government grant to study this, and develop a very precise, but completely useless, formula for calculating it. So while you can’t quantify the value of pants-wearing, I think we’d all agree it adds some value to the workplace.
As Peter Drucker would counsel, I think, the most important numbers in a business are unknown and unknowable. I found that statement ridiculous for 10 years until I understood what he meant (I started reading Drucker in the womb).
Some facts are inescapable:
1) Businesses are ultimately run by humans,
2) humans are largely irratational and
3) the nuances of their interactions defy quantification.
Why two people work together well and two others do not, cannot be quantified in any useful way, it can only be dealt with once observed. We may even be able to understand the conditions in which the probability of success can be increased and try to create them. But how to you calculate the impact of manners, which lubricate (outside the valley) working relationships? Two 3/4 smiles per 8 hour working period, plus 4 “I see’s”, and no “only chimps would agree with your statement” statements?
I realize this is not entirely the point, but having consulted for sevearl companies that wanted to replace management with calculation, I’ve seen first hand the fallacy of it. The effect on the culture (to your point) was disasterous. People become slaves to the numbers, and even the most average person is smart enough to figure out how to manipulate them eventually.
But I could be wrong
Susan, how’s everything? I noticed you haven’t updated your blog in a while. Happy New Year btw.
Thanks for the post. Very intriguing. I’d suggest reading John Assaraf and Murray Smith’s new book “The Answer,” which relates to many of your posts I noticed. Thanks again. Here’s the link: http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?rta=blog